Bring this colorful dessert to your next party. Guaranteed to be a hit!

Whenever I find jello layers offered at parties, I find that it is one of the most popular dishes. Kids AND adults love it equally and you can never have enough to go around. There’s just something fun about eating this beautiful multi-layered dessert. And c’mon, there’s always room for jello!

I’ve been making breakfast strata for several years now but I’ve never blogged about it. The first time I made them was for Nate’s birthday brunch party. It became a staple in our house after that.

Anytime we had leftover bread, it was either breakfast strata or bread pudding. The beauty of this dish is that you can put it all together the night before, then the next morning, all you need to do is preheat the oven and pop it in. This is especially useful when you’re planning a brunch party (a tradition in this house for Nate’s birthday).

This will be the first year that I’m not planning to throw Nate a brunch for his birthday. Yup, his birthday is coming around again soon. Can you guess when it is? I’ll give you a hint: He came home from the hospital in a stocking the year he was born.

I recently found out that what I called a strata can also be called a casserole. Oh well…to me a strata sounds more appealing than a casserole. Anywho… casserole, strata…what does it matta? All I know is that this is good eats.

Take a walk on the semi-wild side of Sarawak, and come face-to-face with some “men of the forest” – the endangered orangutan of Borneo.

Ever since I was a young boy, I’ve wanted to see orangutans. These graceful, red-haired great apes of the forest captured my imagination. The closest I actually came to seeing one was when we visited the San Diego Zoo. Clyde, the giant grandfather orangutan, sat quietly (and forlornly, I thought) with his back up against the glass enclosure. It was kind of a deflating experience for me.

So I was quite excited to find out from my coworkers that there was a nature preserve quite near to Kuching where you could go see orangutans. The best part about it is, it’s not a zoo where the animals are kept captivity behind bars or cages. These orangutans are free to roam the forest park! It’s actually the humans that are penned in.

I hope you save that turkey carcass from Thanksgiving dinner, because you can use it to make turkey jook (“rice congee”, porridge… ahhh, just call it “jook“). And because I’m making it, you know the recipe has to be easy!

Turkey Jook

Originally posted 1 Dec 2008
Updated 25 Nov 2010

The Thanksgiving feast is done. Much of the remaining turkey meat has been cut off the carcass and saved for making sandwiches later. Now you’ve got a bare carcass sitting on your counter. You’re not going to throw that away are you?

Oh, heck no!

One of the best ways to deal with the turkey carcass is to make a big pot of turkey jook the next day. Making turkey jook takes relatively little work, especially compared to the culinary acrobatics that normally take place in the kitchen on Thanksgiving. Here’s what you do:

About Us

Annie is mistress of the kitchen while Nate is the master of the grill and smoker. We cook the homestyle Asian and Hawaiian foods of our younger days while also exploring the wider worlds of Western foods.

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